This might be great for a music workstation. If the Thunderbird port can support low latency audio interfaces like the Focusrite Clarett series you could have a really nice compact set up that would be workable for performance or studio use.

HughPickens.com writes: Astrophysicist Adam Frank has an interesting article in the NYT postulating one answer to the Fermi paradox — that the human evolution into a globe-spanning industrial culture is forcing us through the narrow bottleneck of a sustainability crisis and that civilization inevitably leads to catastrophic planetary changes. According to Frank, our current sustainability crisis may be neither politically contingent nor unique, but a natural consequence of laws governing how planets and life of any kind, anywhere, must interact. Some excerpts:

The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.

By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear

v3rgEz writes: Starting on April 19, 1956, the federal government practiced and planned for a near-doomsday scenario known as Plan C. When activated, Plan C would have brought the United States under marshal law, rounded up over ten thousand individuals connected to "subversive" organizations, implemented a censorship board, and prepared the country for life after nuclear attack.

Let's see what they can come up with. This is about music but so is going to a live concert. You can't pirate a live concert in the sense of completely recreating the live concert experience. Of course you can record the audio tracks, or video record it, but obvious you can't "go to the concert." What I am trying to say is sure, create something new, some cool multimedia thing or whatever. If people want to buy it they will, if not, so what.

Easy. Now that they've given us a chance to "participate" by commenting, that bothersome necessity is taken care of, and the FCC will now ignore the comments and proceed to do whatever they are told to do by their rich friends.

The new Chromecast device looks awesome! Unfortunately my old generation HDTV only has Component Inputs. I wonder if I can plug a Chromecast into some kind of HDMI->Componet converter? Will Chromecast require a secure HDMI connection?

The problem isn't COBOL is is bad management. I think that really says it all. You have to manage a project and that means you have to have support at a high enough level that the impacted departments get their marching orders in agreement with the master plan. Otherwise you are doomed if you have to fit the solution to the middle management tier's "requirements" because their "requirements" are that everything stays the same so their jobs and departments are unaffected by the new solution. That's not going to happen in a ground up re-implementation.